


Everything They Need to Know

by blogotron9000



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Denial of Feelings, Dorks in Love, Everyone Needs A Hug, Feelings, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Multi, OT4, POV Poe Dameron, POV Rey (Star Wars), Poe Dameron Needs A Hug, Rey Needs A Hug, SO MANY FEEEELIIIIINGS, boom boom kiss kiss, with a side of plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-16 22:36:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 19,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13063599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blogotron9000/pseuds/blogotron9000
Summary: The Force is many things, butfairis not one of them.Kindis another.After the events of The Last Jedi, what's left of the Resistance must pick up the pieces--all the harder when the pointless, cruel death of their General stifles their spark of hope. There are things that the previous generation took with them to their graves, and some of them are things that Rey, Poe, and the galaxy's new heroes needed to hear. There's always another battle left to fight, and there's always a reason to doubt you can fight it on your own.Luckily, you don't have to.OT4, centered on Rey and Poe. Contains a few explosions, a potential future for the Resistance, and oh yes, some sweet anxious Kissing Stuff.





	1. Chapter 1

The Force is many things, but _fair_ is not one of them. _Kind_ is another.

After the tattered remnants of the Resistance flee Crait, General Organa directs the Falcon to the planet Sevarcos. There's a mining town outside the main cities, and that's where they make groundfall. Poe makes sure anyone still wearing flightsuit orange stays out of sight in the Falcon before dispatching crew in twos and threes, on the hunt for fuel, food, water to touch up the recyclers and prime the Falcon's overtaxed life support systems. He thinks about trying to suggest that the general stay behind too, but thinks better of it. Her cowl hides her face well enough and he'll eat his helmet if anyone's looking for them _here_.

There's a lot to be said for a place like Sevarcos. First, it's close. Second, it has fuel stations, and the people who own them are generally content to exchange money for goods and services. Third, in the years since its spice mines were liberated from the Empire, the planet has utterly fallen by the wayside. Even more so than most places in the Outer Rim.

This is not, to be sure, a ringing endorsement: it also means that there are spice mines again, whose ownership flip-flops between a pair of local Hutt syndicates whose turf wars have left scars in the face of the world visible from orbit. But the New Republic never carved handholds into this world and the First Order has not yet ground lawlessness into shards beneath the boots of five thousand stormtroopers. Its wounds are its own. They will be Poe's, too, though he doesn't know it yet.

He ducks out of the Falcon with the general sandwiched between him and Lieutenant Connix. They have a long list--a couple of replacement parts for the ship, shelf-stable food. Medical supplies. The streets of the town are narrow and crooked; you could lose an Ewok in the cracks between the paving stones. Rope ladders twist overhead, tying buildings together; masked figures scurry back and forth and mutter to one another. When he's not paying attention, his hand drifts toward his blaster. He forces it back down by his side. They don't want trouble. In and out, fuel up and back into the black before anyone knows they were ever there.

Overhead one of the rope ladders bounces violently. He looks up just in time to see a miner running headlong to dive in through the rag-curtained opening of a window. His arm goes out for the general.

Behind him, the world shifts.

When he comes to there is sound, and there is motion, but both are far away. His world is small and still. Somewhere just outside his hearing, guttural Huttese rolls down the streets and plasma cannons bark. The building that was behind them a moment ago is melting now and the acrid smoke of burning metal and plastic shreds his throat. Or maybe that is his own voice wielding the blade that cuts him raw and deep. He crawls to the motionless shape on the ground.

Plasma burns carve deep canyons into thighs, between ribs. The woman in his arms is so light and so small and the wounds that broke her body have not broken her smile. Her hand is hot and dry in his and she whispers something to him before she goes but he cannot hear her, can only hear Connix begging: "General? General? General?"

Around him voices rake the air, blasters bark. Hands lift, and pull. He moves with them, but he doesn't let go. "Are you hurt?" Finn shouts in his face, but the question doesn't make any sense. When Poe doesn't answer, he turns and shouts to someone behind him. "Back to the ship! We're moving! Go, go, go!"

Someone pushes Poe from behind and he follows the rest of them. Instinct sends him shying away from the scream of a plasma cannon. The scattershot lights constellations in miniature on the arms of his coat, the folds of her dress, and ozone stings his eyes where hair and cloth singe and smolder. How much time did they waste, searching the stars for Luke Skywalker, because they thought they needed the hope he could offer the galaxy? The galaxy had had hope all along, while it had her.

The past tense slices lightsaber-hot through his thoughts. There is no such thing as fairness in the galaxy, not unless you forced it out, wrung the whole world dry of justice with all the strength you had left in your own two hands. Poe's arms are tired, and his hands are stained with blood.

#

Being always the first to know is a burden before it is a blessing.

Rey is already moving before the building explodes. Before the ghostly blue-green streak of plasma rewrites the world inside her eyelids, before the three people standing there become two. Two and the shards of a third. "Finn!" she screams, but he's already following her too.

It's too hard to breathe through the silt-heavy air, through the froth of grief and loss that rises in her throat. Poe struggles to his feet, the general's body shockingly still in his arms. Finn directs him onward, and Rey urges Connix to follow. One hand goes on the other woman's shoulder, the other keeps her staff at the ready as they duck under narrow arches and around corners just behind Finn and Poe. Back to the Falcon, and she can only hope they've had enough time to put some fuel in its hungry tanks.

A double door explodes outward in a shower of sparks. The shadows of the door pours, cool and heavy and so terribly slow, over Rey's friends. She reaches out a hand. No.

This time she is faster than death. Connix stifles a gasp as the door _comes undone_. Atoms sluice away and swirl into the wind; in two seconds, perhaps three, there is nothing left. Nothing left but Finn and the others, which is to say, everything is left. Everything still within her reach. Her throat spasms again.

A Hutt's corpse rolls wetly through the open doors. Inside, someone with a deep gravelly voice is shouting in a language Rey doesn't know. Best not to find out what it is he wants. "Come on," she says, and pulls the open-mouthed Connix along with her. She runs fast enough to overtake Finn and Poe, burdened as they are. She can't run fast enough to leave behind the weight of their eyes on her.

Rose sits at the back of the Falcon, legs dangling over the edge and crutches cast aside. Monitoring the fuel pump, ostensibly, but she gawks at Rey and the rest as they come racing up out of the warren of the town. "Get down!" Rey shouts. "We need to go!"

"But ..." Rose gestures to the pumps. "I've barely started. The tanks aren't full yet."

The spice refinery on the horizon explodes in a shower of meteors. Rose jumps; Rey does not. "They're full enough," she says grimly. Rose nods, and hauls herself to her feet to cast the fuel lines clear.

Poe has disappeared into the ship; Finn scales the gunwale to help Rose down. As he goes he glances down once at Rey, and they share a moment's silent despair. And then he is gone, and Rey has to walk up the Falcon's ramp alone. Gazes cling to her and then slide past. They want things from her. Things she wants to give them, too, but she doesn't know how yet and the people who were supposed to show her could not stay with her long enough. She turns her back, keeps walking.

Chewbacca is in the cockpit, of course, already throwing switches and bellowing his irritation: barely planetside long enough to eat a tin of rations, the tanks aren't even half full and you can't use the Force to fly a freighter as far as he knows--

"Chewie." His name cuts through the noise. He stops, turns around in the pilot's seat, looks at her. She's crying already. She didn't mean to be. She never saw Leia cry, not once, and look at all she lost. Heroes don't cry in front of the people who need them. But when Chewie yowls, a small broken sound, she crosses the space to him and buries her face in the fur of his shoulder. Just a moment, before they go. The Resistance deals purely in moments now, in scraps and rags and every last little drop of blood. But they can spare this one. Wookiee arms crush her. Not painfully. She needs to be crushed right now, to compact herself down so far that she could just disappear, not forever, but for the space of a shuddering breath.

She wanted to be a hero once, but all her heroes are dead now, and the childhood stories she rehearsed in her head a thousand times can never be the same if she must stand on that wide cold stage alone.


	2. Chapter 2

In the end, they give their General back to the stars.

Someone had suggested New Alderaan: setting her ashes in orbit around the space habitat constructed from the wreckage of the Death Star. It's her home, or rather, what's left of it. "Why not? The whole system is already a graveyard," mutters C'ai, in Abednedish. Poe silences him with a look, though fortunately he doesn't think Lieutenant Connix understands the language. The idea doesn't sit quite right with him anyway. Yes, there's something nice about the idea of bringing her back there. Of her joining those hundred million Alderaanians ground to ash beneath the Empire's boot. But New Alderaan is not Alderaan, not anymore. For thirty years New Alderaan has not been a graveyard, it has been a monument. And a living one at that. Inside that habitat there are families living, new children being born. New Alderaan is for the future, not the past.

Connix is the one to naysay the idea in the end, and if anyone should have that right, it's her. "New Alderaan is where _I'm_ from," she says. "Not the general. Her world is gone. If I could take her back there? I would." Her bloodshot gaze is fixed on the floor. Maybe she hasn't been sleeping, either. When Poe closes his eyes, he sees Leia, starlight-pale, veiled in ice, and reaching out toward him. But this time she sails away from him, not toward. Into a mystery where he can't follow. Taking her hopes for the Resistance with her, and whatever plans she had woven out of their tattered remains, she takes them with her as a funeral cloak. Impossible to wrap the mind around: that the Resistance outlived her.

Or maybe it hadn't. As a boy, Poe had helped his father shoot the stray stintarils that lost their packs and came snooping around the family's home to pick through scraps in the trash. The surest way to bring down a stintaril was to sever its dorsal ganglion. But even with a clean shot through, the stupid beast's hind legs would keep scraping the ground for ten or twenty minutes before its back end noticed that the front half was dead.

Whatever kind of shambling undead they are, there's scarcely a dry eye as they surrender their general to the night. Once the doors have closed on the vacuum, they shuffle into the empty loading bay to breathe the cold, sharp air. Rose Tico tries harder than anyone to put on a brave face but heartbreaking sounds squeeze out between her tight lips. Chewbacca has already had his moment of literally devastating rage--the Falcon will need a new galley counter at some point--and now he only keens. It's the sound of a much younger Wookiee, or a much older one. She's the only family he had left, too.

Finn isn't crying but he looks unmoored. His arm is around Rose's shoulders but his gaze hangs heavy elsewhere. On Rey. When Poe meets the young Jedi's eyes--is that right? Is he supposed to call her a Jedi now?--they are as dry as his. He'll mourn later. He's not sure he'll ever stop mourning.

When Rey's gaze flickers and crumbles away, he realizes he and Finn aren't the only ones looking at her. She holds the focus of most of the room, but for Rose and Chewie and Connix and one or two others who are adrift on their own private tides of grief. The Resistance is hungry, for leadership and substance and most of all hope, and Rey is full of warmth and light and life. She licks her lips, and her mouth moves, as if she is trying to prime the pump with the shape of words. Nothing comes out.

"No one is ever really gone." Eyes shift, dart around, snag on Poe. He has the shape of a hero, even if that shape is all shadow and no substance. He's seen all the holodramas, heard all the big speeches that the New Republic broadcast on the anniversary of the destruction of Alderaan, or the Second Death Star. So many celebrations resting atop a fulcrum of death and despair. If there's something in the future besides black and scarlet and the monotone thunder of stormtrooper boots on steel, they are going to need better holidays. "A wiser man than me said that. And I believe him." He takes in the bodies crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the Falcon's loading room. A few dozen. All that's left. "So long as there's life in us, in any one of us, she's still here. The Resistance is still alive. And the spark is still burning."

A murmur of agreement ripples the room. They're not life-changing words, but that's fine. Their lives have already been changed enough. An up-and-at-them speech just now would have been an unkindness. Fan the flames a little, so that they're not quenched by tears. That's all.

Rey smiles at him. Or, not quite smiles, exactly. The look on her face is too brittle; it will break under the weight of a word like _smile_. For a moment he thinks she'll be amazing at this kind of thing, given a little more seasoning. Then he thinks of precisely what sort of seasoning it takes to be able to say goodbye to your loved ones. Maybe she'll be spared that. He can hope so, but it's a broken-backed kind of hope that founders before it ever leaves the ground.

Finn is beside him then, clapping him on the shoulder. He leans into the contact. Playing the big hero is a hell of a drug--he should know. A friend's warm hand on his back is a welcome reminder that he is only human, in the end. "Where are we going now, Poe?"

 _Home_ , something inside him insists, and the word tries to claw its way out of him. He takes a deep breath and suffocates that thought before it works itself free. Wanting to go home, to see Yavin 4 one last time, that's a fatalist thought, and the last thing he wants to do now is throw a blanket of pessimism over the guttering spark he's got here.

Others take his moment of hesitation as an invitation to make their own arguments. Corellia, someone insists; Coruscant, says another. Big systems with big home defense fleets. In the wreckage of the New Republic, all they can do is pick up the pieces, starting with the biggest: the Corellian Defense Forces, Coruscant's Cosmopolitan Navy, the Inner Trade Fleets. Others object: obviously the First Order will head Core-ward first, too, to reclaim the worlds from which the old Empire once held court. Why jump headfirst into the rancor's mouth?

"Rori." He fumbles up the name before he can think twice. It cuts off the crosstalk, and the brewing arguments. A few brows furrow in confusion. A few breaths are released, and with them, tension. Someone sighs and mutters something about swamps.

"The base is still there," says Connix. The twists of hair on either side of her head aren't quite evenly pinned today, one an inch or so higher than the other. "Well. It's not a base anymore. But some people retired there, after the Concordance was signed and we didn't need a Rebellion anymore." Her lips crimp at the irony of those words. "The Mid Rim should be safer than the Core …"

"Especially if we stay tucked away on a moon like Rori." Poe nods. The more he talks the more convinced he is that it's the right choice. It's certainly the safe choice. "Less traffic up there. We'll steer clear of Naboo itself." Relief flashes across a few faces at that; distress or disappointment paint others in shades of shadow. "Get some actual fuel in us, fly under the radar for a cycle until we get ourselves leveled out and steady on again."

Rose's chin juts out. "There are a lot of people out there who can't just drop out of sight for a while. Planets. Systems. We can't just lick our wounds and hope for the best--"

"Who's just hoping?" he says, a little too sharply, and her face blanches. He takes a step back, scrubs a hand over his face. It's sandpaper-rough--when was the last time he had a shave? He honestly can't even remember--and so is his voice when it comes out. "Look. We're not just going to ground. We'll talk plans when everyone's got a level head. For now? Rori."

Chewbacca yowls that he'll go set the course. The others peel away in twos and threes until it's just Poe and the silent, empty bay. It's cold in here, and not getting any warmer.


	3. Chapter 3

What's left on Rori is more than a base, and less. When the Millennium Falcon puts in, the wind-shear from its passage tears away laundry lines strung between two rusting radar arrays. When Rey emerges from the ship, she turns back to see a trio of children, two human and one Bothan, crouched in the long wet grass to retrieve sodden shirts and trousers. They stare at her, and she stares back. It seems like a thousand years since she last saw a child, though it can only have been a few weeks. She wants to go closer, close enough to catch the peal of their laughter, the glimmer in their eyes. Before she can take a tentative step toward them, someone bumps into her from behind. "Help me with this crate?" asks Lieutenant Connix, who has been dragging an empty supply container down the ramp all on her own. Rey hurries to help. When she looks again, the young ones are gone and the laundry flies like a ragged flag over the golden-green afternoon.

A fleeting guilt tugs at the inside of her chest. What if she might have eased their work, with the Force--whipped up all the lost washing with a whirlwind of mystical powers? Could she have done that? Should she have? When she closes her eyes the small soft voice of the Force whispers to her, but it does not answer when she asks it what it is _for_.

Two older women emerge from the biggest bunker to greet them. Both are human, one with gray hair lanced through with white above a jagged scar; the other's hair is still space-black but the lines around her eyes are as deep and crooked as the ways of the Force. They smile uncertainly as the Falcon deposits a dozen-odd Resistance fighters in a state of disarray: wounded, hungry. Poe comes out to the front of the group to shake the women's hands. "We're all that's left," Rey hears him softly say, and the older of the pair turns to scan over the ragged assemblage. Her smile fades when she doesn't find what she's looking for, and her bony fingers clutch at her partner's sleeve. Rey knows exactly who it is they're missing, because she feels those ragged edges in the holes of her own heart.

Finn nudges her from behind--she knows it's him before she turns and sees him. He offers her a smile; she accepts it gladly, greedily. "I hope they've got some bacta here to spare," he says.

She nods. "I hope Rose will sit still long enough to get a bacta patch applied." The technician has been up and about on her shattered leg too much over these past few days--how many has it been already? Rey has lost count and a brief terror grips her that months, years have flown through her grasp--but no, a little carefully applied bacta may yet restore her some of the range and function her badly-broken limb has cost her. At least, if there is bacta, she can sand down the rough edges of her pain. She doesn't talk about that, but Rey has heard it, gnawing on Rose's bones and in the soft still moments aboard the Falcon.

Something in her expression must have shifted. Finn's eyes sharpen, his head leans in closer. "You all right? Do you need anything?"

She needs a hundred thousand impossible things, or maybe just wants them. A shake of her head, a hand on his arm. "You're sweet. I'm fine. Thank you. Go help Rose." She glances back toward the ship; Rose still hasn't emerged. "Or at least take away whatever she's still working on. Whatever it is, it'll keep." He smiles ruefully and moves away, back toward the Falcon with light, ginger steps. These days he is forever moving like every step takes him over broken glass. You don't have to be afraid of me, she wants to say, or of Rose; whatever it is you think will hurt you, I won't let it. She doesn't say it, though, because she is afraid too, of what will happen when someone tugs too hard at the fragile lace that binds them all together--

She shakes her shoulders to bring herself back to the present. Poe is still talking with the two women; Rey should be up there with him. Maybe not leading, but finding a way into the orbit of leadership. Putting herself close enough to its gravity to be pulled in. She shoulders between the other Resistance members just as the two women break away, pointing to empty supply crates, beckoning for everyone to follow them back toward the huddled buildings that barely seem to break out of the steamy swamp waters. Rey helps Connix heft the empty crate once more. She could lift it with the Force--could lift it and all the rest, in fact--but would that just look like showing off? There's helpfulness, and then there are cheap parlor tricks, and the line between the two is not as distinct as it ought to be. The weight of the crate tugs at her shoulder, warms and wearies the muscles of her arm. It feels good, _immediate_ somehow, in a way that using the Force would not have. She and Connix swap wistful words in breathless snippets, as the exertion allows them: fanciful daydreams about what kind of food they might have in the old base, hopes for a night's sleep without Chewbacca's snoring or the off-key lullaby of burbling droids.

They settle the empty supply crates in a stack outside one building, to be filled later. Then the two older women turn away from the lines of laundry and the echoes of children's songs, and escort them to a cement bunker grown over with thick green-brown moss. Not so long ago, Rey remembers marveling over how much green the galaxy could hold. But just as sand found its way into every nook and cranny of her home on Jakku, so too does moisture seem to have suffused this place. When they crack open the door, the air that rolls out is musty, clotted with humidity. Ahch-To was wet too, but the salt in its seas must have scoured that world clean. There is no saline breeze to scrub the sickly smell out of the corners of Rori.

On the second story of the bunker, there are cells--rooms--equipped with simple slabs for beds. The Resistance straggles in to find places. No pushing or shoving or jockeying for position; there is more than enough space for everyone. This bunker alone must have held five hundred troops, once upon a time. No longer.

Rey shuffles into a room near the southeast corner. There are no windows, of course; even the strongest plastoid glass is no match for a bombardment. A little yellowed light leaks out of a lamp recessed deep into the ceiling. She stands in the doorway until a scuffled footstep at the open door makes her turn. It's the gray-haired woman, holding out a folded pile of what must be blankets. Rey accepts them gratefully, though she thinks she could have fallen asleep on the bare cement slab just as easily. "You can stay as long as you want," the older woman says. "As long as you need to. It's not … " Her voice trembles, betraying her easy, open expression. "It's not much, what we've got here. But it'll last a while. You know?"

That sounds like surrender, sedition, any number of gentle sibilant words that would be so easy to drift down into and never rise from in righteous fury again. Like an ember that hisses as it cools hard and gray. "I know," Rey says, and the old woman nods once, jerkily. She shuts the door behind her when she goes.

The second it shuts, someone slams up against the other side.

Rey jumps, and puts up a hand as if to brace the door. But of course the attack is not physical, and the person on the other side is separated from her not by an inch of reinforced steel but by millions of miles. More blows hammer down and she reminds herself of that distance, like a mantra. Kylo Ren is not just outside, it is only through the tangled, crooked webs of the Force that he can reach out and rattle the frame of her world. Even across that distance, rage and despair thrum into her with every blow he strikes against her defenses. His blind, incandescent insistence that she listen to him--that reaches too, and its heat raises a flush to her cheeks and forehead. If she let him any closer, that heat would scorch her, would turn her to ash with the poisonous of radiation of easy lies and empty promises. He would tell her whatever she wants to hear, if he thought it would get him what he wants.

A part of her wants to hear it anyway. She grimaces. She can own that weakness in herself without hating it--that's one difference between her and him. He can come no closer, anyway, not unless she wills it, and the whole of her is stronger than that one small wounded part. Her hand stays up. In time, the barrage fades and Rey's arm falls, trembling, by her side.

She makes up the bed with what reserves of strength she has left and throws herself down atop the stiff blankets. They are musty too, with undercurrents of yellowspice and oil-of-milaflower. Maybe the one who once used these still lives here somewhere on the base. Or maybe, like Leia Organa, they sleep somewhere out in the vast cold nothingness. Either way, their ghost makes for cold company.


	4. Chapter 4

Even after the Resistance has been parceled out between a few dozen rooms, most of them drift outside again in twos and threes. Because they don't want to be alone, maybe. Or maybe just because they'd rather not stifle in the spore-addled air inside the old base.

Down on the other side of the base, a series of old hangars huddle together. A few of their half-open doors fail to hide the bones of a few old A-wings and at least one stripped-down shuttle; two of  the others have windows cut into the sides through which Poe can observe busy domestic scenes as he passes: two older children cutting green ori-pods down to size for canning, two men bent over an auto-loom, a kitchen droid submitting irritably to repairs at the hands of an eIderly Ithorian. In between the boxy cement structures built by a Rebellion whose time has come and gone, there are smaller buildings, squarish little daub-and-wattle houses held together by swamp clay. At first glance Poe thinks they look almost comically out of place on the old Rebel base. But no, the houses belong here in the swamp. They're made of it, they're _of_ it in a way that the heavy bunkers, sinking into the soft ground at their far edges, could never have been.

Ankau, the gray-haired woman who welcomed them here, crouches beside a shallow pit filled with smoldering sand that she digs through with a metal shovel to find the roasted fish buried within. Her wife Orid works the filtration apparatus just across the way, and a pair of Resistance fighters help her fill tankers with the purified swamp water and tote them over to the cookfire. Most of the others have collected there too, Resistance clotted up in tight little knots on one side, the native inhabitants congregating quietly on the other. The children sing little call-and-answer waiting songs; the adults worry about what work has yet to be done and how long it will take. It should be comforting in its familiarity, the easy rhythms of food and friends and family. But there's no true enduring peace to be had in the galaxy right now. It's only a matter of time before the eggshell-fragile safety shatters and the sulfurous rot of war rolls free. The hair on the back of Poe's neck prickles as he waits for the tides to turn.

The smoke from the fire takes the edge off the heavy smell of wetness rising off the swamps, but it doesn't do much to lift Poe's appetite. Ankau offers him one of the first slabs of fish, still wrapped in its reeking shroud of red-brown kelp; he turns her aside politely. Orid sits down beside him and he does take the flask of water she hands him. "Sounds like there's fighting in the Core," she says, and there it is. Suddenly all eyes and ears and various other more unusual sensory appendages are all riveted on her, and on Poe too. Ankau, unaware of the attention or just uncaring, nods toward an antenna array, which must still function beneath the layer of scummy moss that drapes its wires. "Focused around Coruscant."

"No surprise there," says Orid. "Thirty years ain't enough time for the upcity there to forget how nice and snug and safe they felt with the Empire's boot holding the lowcity down."

"The Cosmopolitan Navy," someone says uncertainly. Poe's already doing the math in his head. A half-dozen cruisers and frigates from Coruscant burned with the New Republic, but that still leaves the system's home fleet with ten or twelve capital ships plus state-of-the-art ground defense systems.

Connix, perched atop a pile of sandbags, shifts uneasily. "The Cosmopolitan Navy is the best that money can buy. They could hold out against a First Order deployment indefinitely."

"How much food stores do they have to hold out against a siege?" one of the locals objects, and he's not wrong. Nothing green grows on the city-planet of Coruscant. It depends on trade with agrarian worlds to fill its billions of hungry mouths.

A ripple of murmurs breaks around Connix, who tries once more to rally. "If the rest of the Core's defensive fleets joined forces to help Coruscant, they could take on--"

"They can't take on the whole First Order." Poe bites his tongue, too late to pin the words to it but just in time for the bright coppery spurt of pain to jolt him back to his senses. He gulps tepid water from the flask in his hand, swallows, spits. A red-brown cloud spreads tentacles in the puddle between his boots. "And it will be the _whole_ First Order. They've got nothing to look over their shoulder for, now. There's no Resistance fleet to come pick off the systems they're already holding."

The silence is punctuated only by the far-off shouts of the base's children. In excitement, or anger, too hard to tell at this distance. "Poe," says Connix. She doesn't use Poe's rank. That's all right. At this point Poe's not even sure whether he's a captain or commander or--Force help them all--a general. The fading sunlight melts in her shining eyes. "Where do we go from here?"

Poe's fists tighten on the water flask. Instinct has always driven him straight ahead, even into the heaviest cover fire and the tightest tailspin. That instinct has abandoned him now, or maybe it's still there, but there are other things riding him now too, and they drag behind him like an anchor. A hundred deaths, a thousand, yes, that'll throw up some drag. The Resistance is a dart that he holds in his hand, and the target, vanishingly small now, dances somewhere out of sight. Miss now, and there's no second chance. "I just need some time to think this through--"

"He doesn't know." C'ai starts in Abednedo but switches to Basic as he raises his voice. "He doesn't have a plan!"

Fear is a fast-catching fire and this moment, this place, is well-stocked with eager kindling. Faces scorch with distrust and shock; whispers smolder and blacken at the edges. "General Organa didn't give him--couldn't trust him to--she was the only one who--"

" _Listen_." He shoots to his feet. "I'm not going to lie to you all. You know we're at the bum end of a box canyon with a shock cannon pointed down our throat. If there's a way out of here …" He wants to say, I'll find it, but the words founder and drown in the sour copper tang under his tongue.

Connix meets his eyes. "Are you saying the Resistance is over?"

"No." Something can't be over if it never really started, if it was only a shadow of someone else's dream. The dying sun sinks into the clouds and the shadows of the old base slide cold fingers up the ack of Poe's neck. He breaks Connix's gaze, turns on his heel. "I'm saying the Rebellion never ended."

#

Behind him, a cloud of remonstrations blots out what's left of the sun. He retreats, knowing he's leaving Connix and Ankau and a few of the others to hold them all together. They're better suited to that job than him, at least right now. "We will be the spark," he mutters, and grinds his teeth against the rest of the words behind those.

The door of his room in the old base crashes shut, and he looks around for something else to slam. No likely takers: the only piece of furniture in the place is the cement-slab excuse for a bed. He wads up the bedding and throws that against the wall instead. It bounces soundlessly off and flutters to the floor in an unsatisfying tangle.

A rap at the door. Poe curses and scuffs the mussed bedding into a corner with a swift kick. "What is it?"

The door cracks open and Finn sticks his head in. "It's me," he says, unnecessarily, and that pulls half a smile to Poe's face. "I heard the door …"

"Slipped out of my hand." The smile slides away from him. He grasps at something else, quickly, before Finn gets a foothold on that obvious lie. "How's Rose?"

"That lady, Orid, gave us a couple of patches. What they could spare. It'll help." Finn's mask of optimism is paper-thin and patently pasted-on. "Are you all right?"

Poe has no answer to that question, has no answers at all anymore. A hundred years to mourn, two hundred more to just catch up on some damn sleep, and maybe he'd be ready again with an easy response or a quick comeback. He hasn't got a hundred years, though, so he drops to a sit on the bare cement slab and throws out a question of his own. "Where do _you_ think we should go from here?"

Finn hesitates, then enters the room. He sits beside Poe, folds his hands, looks up at the low ceiling with a creased brow. "The kind of people they put in charge of Star Destroyers, they never hesitate. They make a decision and they just--commit to it, you know?"

"Yeah?" Poe drops his head into his hands. The metallic odor of the water flask still clings to his palms. "Thanks for the pep talk, buddy."

"What? No, you're not--I'm not finished." Finn's sigh rattles something lodged deep in Poe's chest. "I mean, they pick a course and then it's full power ahead. No second guessing, no looking back. No regrets." He looks sideways at Poe, who is trying to imagine what the world would look like without gravity wells of regret and doubt and loss to warp its every curve. "And if it doesn't work out the way they want, then someone else is going to hang for it. It doesn't matter if they do the wrong thing, if there's some horrible cost attached, because they'll never be the one to pay it."

Poe is too tired to pick through the threads here, to pull out the bigger pattern Finn is trying to show him. The anchor drags behind him, wearing him down, slowing his thoughts. "I'm not the one who's had to pay for my mistakes either."

"Poe." The sudden weight of Finn's arm across his shoulders nearly drops him. He was braced against disappointment, not--whatever this is. "You haven't stopped paying it for a single second since we left Crait."

Poe's hands fall away from his face. Finn is right there, unsmiling and intent. Worried. He says, "I know what good leaders do, because I've seen bad ones. Where we should go next, man, _I_ don't know." His hand tightens on Poe's shoulder. "But I'll go there, as long as it's with you. With ... all of you."

Needing comfort from--Poe struggles to parse that thought. From--a friend? From one of the people he's supposed to be leading now? Needing comfort from, well, _whoever_ is not something good leaders do.

He takes it anyway. "Thanks," he says. Their heads and hands hang together in the space between them, close but not quite touching.


	5. Chapter 5

The faraway sound of someone else's grief slices open the fragile veil of Rey's sleep.

Shuddering sobs, muffled by an arm or a blanket. A real sound, an immediate one, not an echo rolling to her along the trembling webs of the Force. Her knuckles grind the crust from her eyes as she slips through her cracked door and into the hallway. Bare feet whisper on the rough floor; she pauses at the room adjacent, then knocks. "May I come in?"

A moment's pause, then a thick wet voice. "… Okay."

Rey slides inside. Rose has already pushed herself up to a sit, her bad leg stretched out in front of her with a bulky bacta pack taped about the knee. She drags her sleeve across her face a few times, as if that will make Rey forget what she has heard. She approaches cautiously, sits down next to Rose. One hand settles of its own volition atop the bacta pack and Rey's mind follows it. She can _see_ the ragged outline of Rose's pain, bent and broken lines of Force energy twisted back upon themselves. She can see too how she might act upon those living ley lines … but no. That is a delicate balance, one she dares not yet walk upon. She might heal Rose's broken bones, but in calling upon marrow and blood to thrive and grow and spread, she might just as easily call a tumor into being. Maybe someday she will have the deftness that Force healing would require. But not today. "I'm sorry," she says, and her voice is still raw from sleep. "It must be terribly painful."

"What? Oh." Rose's smile breaks through the clouds of sorrow like a ray of sunshine. "It hurts, but it's just a leg. It's not going to fall off. I was just--" The smile falters and is eclipsed again. "I was thinking about how few of us are left. How many we've lost. And what we can even do, now." Another fat tear traces the curve of her cheek and she smears it away with the back of one hand. "I'm sorry. Crying doesn't help anything and I shouldn't be bawling like a baby in front of a Resistance hero--"

"Rose." Rey reaches over and lays her hand atop Rose's. "You _are_ a Resistance hero."

That stops Rose short, snaps her shoulders taut with sudden tension. A jangling of nerves whispers through the Force to stir the fine hairs on the back of Rey's neck. But then Rose relaxes and smiles again, sadly this time. "I think I've seen too many holodramas. Isn't this supposed to be the part where we fight over Finn?"

"Fight over him?" Rey repeats, and her tongue suddenly feels too big and thick for her mouth. "I'm not--I mean, he isn't--"

"I've seen the way he looks at you." Rose's nose crinkles. "I mean, who wouldn't? You're a real Jedi, like you walked right out of the legends." She looks away before she wipes her nose on the cuff of her sleeve. "I'm sorry. I didn't know, back on Crait. I kissed him." Her eyes dart back to Rey's face, which burned with scarlet heat. "In my defense, I thought I might die."

"You don't have anything to apologize for!" Rey says, before Rose can say anything else. Before she has to dig deeper into her feelings about any of this. She adds a stumbling amendment: "And I'm not a Jedi, not really." There's so much more important going on right now, isn't there, than this snarled knot of emotions and relationships, her and Finn who smiles like a sunrise, and Rose who is so good and strong and kind to ever be hurt and she's been hurt so much already, and Poe too in distant orbit to the rest, too far to touch but close enough for her to be pulled off balance by a certain sort of gravity, and if she tugs too hard at one of the loose strings, what's to keep the whole mess from coming undone? There's so little left to bind them all together as it is. There's so little _left_. And it's so selfish, in the end, to desire the warmth of the sun while the rest of the galaxy is falling into shadow. Her fingers tighten on Rose's. "He's my friend. But he isn't _mine_."

A little laugh squeezes out between Rose's crimped lips. "I bet you've never cried in front of him," she says. "Bursting into a weepy mess just because things got hard."

It's self-deprecating humor, the joke jabbed in at the soft tender places in Rose's own heart. But the rough edges abrade old wounds in Rey too. A hero, the last quasi-Jedi, doesn't dare cry in front of the people who have braided their golden hopes into a heavy crown that she must wear. "That's wrong," she says. She means to hold Rose's hand tighter but instead she shakes it, hard. "You're not any less for that, do you hear? Heroes are allowed to cry. To be hurt. You did something brave, something amazing--you didn't stop being a person and anyway who makes you feel that way--"

Rose holds her arms out and Rey pitches forward into them. Rose's embrace is soft and solid and the front of her shirt absorbs Rey's tears and the stifled sound of her sobs as well. "Hey," she says, and she's not done crying either, "I know. I know. I know."

Together they cry themselves to stillness. By the time she is finished Rey is lying alongside Rose. Her head is tucked into Rose's shoulder; her hair clings wetly to Rose's cheek where it rests. There is still a festering wound behind her breastbone. But bled clean of the poisonous salt water that has clotted inside her, perhaps that wound can scab over at last. Having drained that hollow echoing space inside her, she feels somehow fuller than she has in ages. She sighs, releasing the last of the tension in her face.

As if in answer, the whole base shudders beneath them.


	6. Chapter 6

"To positions! To positions! It's those damn stormtrooper-wannabes from Oreck Lows--"

The distant yell rolls across the base to Poe as he crashes through the bunker doors and out into the open. The base inhabitants look like figurines, so small and far away, as they run back and forth, through clouds of smoke. His pulse slams in his throat as he works to process what's happening, but the picture doesn't come together until a small ship cruises low overhead, a wide-keeled bogrunner of some kind. Its ventral guns open a half a dozen smoking trenches in the ground--heading straight toward him where he stands before the bunker's doors.

He flings himself out of the way and feels more than sees other bodies crashing to the ground beside him. The last plasma bolt vaporizes the standing water near the entrance, and he throws his arms up to protect his face from the boiling spray. When he looks up again, the ship--an outdated gunrunner of dubious origin under layers of scabby modifications--drops another few blasts harmlessly against the roof of the bunker before making a wide sweep to come around for another pass.

In the red-glowing haze of melted slag, something crystallizes in Poe, something clear and solid and terribly fragile. He hauls himself to his feet and turns to help up the people behind him: Finn's already up, there's Rey and Connix, a few-odd others. Another pale face peeps at him from just behind the doors; Rose, he thinks. He shouts at her. "In or out! I want those doors shut before more strafing fire comes through!"

She commits to _out_ , swinging her bad leg over the smoldering divots in the ground and leaning on a makeshift crutch. Damn. In retrospect, he should have just told her to take cover, not given her a choice in the matter.

Too late now. He steals one more quick glance over his shoulder to assess the situation. There's not much chance the ship's going to bring the bunker down, but he can't say the same about those low-slung hangars and clay huts. "I need to get to the Falcon. Rey, you're on me." He jabs a finger at the chaos on the other side of the camp. Through the smoke, Ankau's shock of gray hair is just barely visible; she and two others are trying to unjam the cover of a ground artillery barrel. "The rest of you help them with ground defense. We don't know how many more of these guys are going to make an appearance. Rose--"

His words are lost in another barrage from above. Chips of cement pepper their backs as they duck; when he looks again the cover is still over the artillery barrel but Ankau and the rest are nowhere to be seen. May the force be with them, if there's anything left for the force to be with. "Rose, the civilians are running blind. You direct them into the bunker while we keep that bogrunner busy." She nods jerkily. "Now _move_!"

He breaks away, curving wide around the steaming trenches carved into the ground and a fresh round of incoming fire. Without having to look, he knows Rey is right behind him. They pull up in the shelter of a broken hangar door before the last run across open space toward the Falcon. The bay door is open and the engines hum with life; as Poe watches the dorsal gun turret swings to track the bogrunner's movement. Not fast enough, though--Chewbacca is going to need the Falcon in motion if he's going to get a clear shot at the thing.

Poe checks the position of the bogrunner: swinging wide for another pass. Enough time to get clear before it comes back around. Before he can make a break for it, Rey catches his arm and yanks him back. "Wait!"

A distant high-pitched whine penetrates the ringing in his ears. Rey points: three small flyers, armored-bottoms, engines guttering wildly. One of them is flying a tattered gray flag behind it with a hand-painted First Order symbol on it. The largest of the three stays aloft, laying down a few crackling bolts of cover fire, as the other two settle to land on dry ground. When the door pops on the first, a handful of people straggle out with blasters in their hands. Not stormtroopers, not even close--they have no uniform, and their faces are covered, but only with tied rags and not anonymous masks.

The cold crystal of purpose in Poe thaws a bit in the heat of that realization: that this--this ragtag band of Empire-missing swamp dwellers is somehow an existential threat to the _entire Resistance_. That it could all end here, now, for want of a few warm bodies and a couple of snubfighters and a cool head in charge--

A hand slides into his. He looks askance at Rey, but she's focused only on the Falcon. "Now," she says, yanking him with her, and then he's running headlong toward the waiting ship. A few stray blaster shots zip harmlessly past, but then a roaring Resistance vanguard led by C'ai steals the attackers' attention.

"You shoot," says Poe, when Rey hesitates in the hallway. "I'll steer." She nods, and darts away.

It feels good to have a ship's controls back under his hands. Strange, too, to have them belong to a full-blown freighter; to _this_ ship, of all ships. A thrill, but an illicit one. And even if he doesn't properly belong at this console in particular, the ship answers his call and judders into the air. Lateral stabilizers need tuning. Well, he'll have time to worry about _that_ after surviving _this_.

Chewbacca bellows from the top turret and Poe quickly sights the bogrunner and the lone small fry that's still providing air support. "Not here," he shouts over his shoulder. "We blow that directly over the base and we're looking at big civilian casualties. We gotta lure 'em out of range." Which means he needs to give that bogrunner pilot something they'll think they can catch. "Give 'em just a little to worry about, you two, but don't bring them down just yet."

Both Chewie and Rey begin taking pot-shots, a few rounds that bounce harmlessly off the bogrunner's armed front deflectors. Poe leans into the controls and brings the Falcon around. A flip of two switches makes the engines gulp and jerk: wounded prey. He sets a trajectory that would take the Falcon out of atmo, as if he means to flee. "Come and get it."

They do. The bogrunner peels off, leaving just the one little gnat of a flyer to menace the base. Poe shifts power to the rear deflectors--not like the engine's drawing that much burn right now with the little show he's putting on anyway--as the first teeth-rattling shots send the Falcon bucking. The bogrunner's bolts barely make a fizzle against the deflectors; he doubts they were equipped any time in the last twenty years.

But they're out over open swamp now. "Do it!" He cuts forward engine power entirely while leaving the repulsors in thrust.

The Falcon drops speed so fast that the bogrunner overshoots her in a tick. The shot Poe has set up couldn't be more perfect: directly down the barrel of its unguarded back end. Both Rey and Chewbacca light the bastard up. Burning debris rains down upon the gray-green waters; thin plumes of swamp gas go up in nebulous clouds of flame.

"Yes!" Poe cries, and Rey echoes him from down below. The Resistance doesn't die today, and it doesn't die at the hands of one ugly souped-up bogrunner. He turns the ship around, back toward the old base, to pick off those last little flyers.

He sees it just as he gets the base in his scope, and then a plasma-yellow burst from below paints a washed-out afterimage across his retinas. That'll be his crew with the ground cannon, he thinks proudly.

"Poe?" shouts Rey. Pride founders, and sinks beneath the surface of a nauseous sea. The wreckage of the flyer has exploded over the new buildings on the base--the hangars, the out-kitchens. The clay cottages. Rori is a sodden world, but even water will burn if you pour enough unused fuel on it. And right now the base is covered in the stuff. From Poe's vantage, it's only an ember at first. By the time he drops the Falcon onto the only patch of dry flat land big enough to hold her, the flames are trying to pull the clouds down out of the sky.

When he comes down out of the Falcon there are voices, sounds. A bucket brigade, led by Rose, whose face is flushed red for screaming; she points with a crutch too bent to put her weight upon, and people run in the direction she gives. He tries to get a hold on the situation, on what to do next, but ideas fall through him like sand through a sieve. Too bad he can't just damn well fly the fire out of here.

"Rey!" That shout breaks up the dull echo in his chest. He looks around for her and finds the Resistance's precious, only Jedi, walking straight into the heart of the blaze with her arms outstretched as if for a friend's familiar embrace.


	7. Chapter 7

Fire speaks to Rey in the voice of the dark side. Strangely beautiful, and so tempting, shot through with deep rich veins of desire. _Let it all burn away_ , the fire suggests, through the sweet seductive voice of the force's underbelly, _your duty, your burdens. If it all burns, then there is nothing left for you to defend. Let it burn or you will live your whole life fleeing from fight to fight with never a moment's peace._

The fire strokes her cheek with hot dry air, and offers her its power, its potential. Ah. No. She understands the fire, but she doesn't want what it would give her. She turns aside that cruel, mighty strength, and surrenders her own instead. Through her the Force flows, and the fire drinks it, drinks her, greedily down.

Exhaustion cinches a rope about her chest and squeezes tight, tugs her downward. Her knees strike cement; dying embers bite through her trousers and at her skin. The urge to say no, to fight back, rises in her. She turns it aside. Don't feed the flames, she tells herself. Instead, starve them of fuel …

The soft weight of her surrendered strength settles over the fire. Over Rey, too. It is a terrible weight, worse somehow for this distance from self, this sense of remove. Her shoulders curve forward under that pressure, even as the flames smother and shrivel for want of oxygen. _Burn_ , the dying fire screams to her, _or you will be burned_.

An easy choice. Rey would far rather let herself be hurt than hurt another. Once more the flames rage against their extinguishment, and then, at last, they go out.

Rey climbs to her feet upon shaky legs, reclaiming her power amid all that she has consigned to the flames. Still, she's almost bowled over when a pair of strong arms wrap around her. "Rey!" Finn cries. He gives her a little shake by the shoulders, as if he jarred her any harder she might crumble into ash. "Are you all right? "

She looks around. The ground around her is charred and blackened. Smoke and steam crawl in between the ruined stumps of what once were houses, creeping skyward in thin columns here and there. "I wasn't fast enough," she says. A mix of regret and sooty fumes turns the words into a croak. That's the fire's voice still, speaking despair and loss and devastation.

But Finn's voice cuts through that numbing distance. "Rey, what? No. _Look._ " He spins her around so that she can see, through the gray haze, the surviving homes untouched by flame; the hangars too, even the dilapidated radar array where strings of laundry still flutter in the hot breeze.

And the people, too, standing well back behind the ring of scorched ground. Their eyes are wide, their mouths open. Out in front is Rose, edging forward. She stops, though, once she crosses the burn line, as if a deflector shield stands between her and Rey and Finn. Behind her Rey spies Orid, her hand braced against a still-standing wall; tears cut clean lines through the soot smearing the older woman's face.

The onslaught of attention should have smothered her as readily as she smothered the fire in turn. But she has left something behind in the ashes here, and she turns away from the hungry stares, from their naked need for a miracle. For hope. She needs hope too. She leans into Finn, pulls his face to hers, takes a kiss as much as gives one. "Thank you," she says, into the warm open space of his mouth. She means: thank you for showing me what I could not see, thank you for being so very much yourself. _Thank you_ is all she manages to say, though, and before he can answer--in kind or otherwise, she breaks away.

Rose hasn't moved. As Rey approaches, she shifts from foot to foot, and her mouth opens and closes around unspoken words. "Good job," she finally says, when Rey is directly in front of her, and her smile is stiff around the edges.

Rey closes the distance without pausing and presses her mouth to Rose's. The faint taste of salt and ash and sour fear. A testing moment, a consideration. _Is this--? Yes, this is._ She smiles against Rose's lips.

This time it's Rose who draws back first, though her hand lingers on Rey's wrist. "Uh," she says, and continues in a string of the same sputtering syllables. "Well. I. Um. Wow."

Finn has trotted up beside them. His eyebrows angle skyward as he looks between the two women; Rey can feel the questions churning just under his surface. She doesn't have the words for answers right now, so she grabs his hand instead. Rose on the one side, Finn on the other. It feels a bit like balance. It feels like a family she can choose for herself. "Come on," she says. "These people will still need our help."

They move outward from the cinder-scorched ring, Finn and Rey walking, Rose leaning into Rey's shoulder as she gamely straps her still-bacta-packed leg. There's work to do: wounds to be cleaned and tightly bound, wreckage to be pawed through for salvageable goods. At some point both Finn and Rose drift away from her sides, but Rey doesn't mind. They are both still there, they her twinned moons, or she the single warmly-lit planet in thrall to their binary stars.

It seems almost perfect, and as she works, Rey sinks into the comfort of that _perfect_ rather than letting herself be snagged on the unkind hooks of _almost_.

#

No one gets much sleep that night, by the time all is said and done: the debris cleared, the wounded treated, the damn stabilizers on the Falcon realigned to the best of Chewbacca's abilities under the current circumstances. Poe helps handle the hangar doors sealed shut along their seam where a bolt of bogrunner plasma melted the metal; over his shoulder he checks now and then to see what's going on around Rey (and, parenthetically, Finn and Rose). The low burn in his gut when he looks at them is from worry, yes, that out of fear or jealousy one of the base residents will do one of them harm. That whatever light burns inside Rey will founder under the weary tide of adulation each time one of these people plucks at her sleeve, murmurs for her attention. That's all. That's all it is.

Poe apologizes to Ankau for bringing this mess down on her head, but she turns his apologies aside. "Those swamp rats come down on us out of Oreck Lows every couple of months, looking for trouble and anything that's not nailed down." She jerks her head at the corner where a few of the other adults have rounded up the invaders in a makeshift pen. "If it wasn't in the name of the First Order or the Empire or whoever's boots they're trying to lick now, it would have been to raid our food stocks or round up our gas harvest. We'll send 'em packing. Should take them a few weeks to get back home, if the waters are high enough and they have to take the land bridge way around." A sudden grin splits her face. "We've never brought down one of those big bogrunners before. Should be some good salvage there if we can skim the wreck out of the swamp."

Orid tags up behind her wife then and lays her hand on Ankau's shoulder. She's wearing a helmet, standard snubfighter fare; one side has the old Rebel starbird painted on it, and upon the other is scrawled in lopsided Aurebesh, _Don't Shoot, I'm Too Pretty To Die_. When he cocks his head in question, Orid grins at him. "We got a couple A-wings we can have spaceworthy if you give us a couple hours before you head out again."

Ankau's already-wrinkled face creases further. "Not the one the sun-slugs laid eggs in, I hope."

Orid laughs, but Poe holds up a hand. "I can't ask you to follow us into--whatever we're heading into. What we're up against--"

"I know what it is we're up against, son, because I've been up against it before." Orid's gaze drifts past him. He follows her line of sight to the point where it settles: on the halo of dawn's first sunlight that's draping Rey's shoulders. "I just hope this time, we do a better job putting it down. Finishing what we started." She smiles, but a sigh escapes out through her softly curved lips. "I want to live long enough to see the exciting new mistakes you young ones make. Not recycle through the same ones, over and over again."

He's ready to try a different tack--you've served your time, you've done all you could--but Orid is already kissing her wife, a kiss that lingers and says, without words, a gentle goodbye. He looks away, but they're already done, the distance opening up between them as Orid strides toward the hangars. "I'm sorry," he says again, and the words are just as hollow now as when he used them to start the conversation.

He moves off to find Connix, see what the supply situation is and what's still left on the checklist of what-the-hell-next. Finn catches his eye first, though, standing at the bottom of the Falcon's ramp. He raises one hand--in greeting, in question? Poe just nods in response, and moves off in the direction of the bunker. Best not to get pulled into that orbit so easily. Finn has what he's been looking for, if not perhaps the precise shape he expected to find it in. The phrase _those crazy kids_ flits through Poe's head as he ducks inside the bunker, and he feels a million years old for it. They can sort themselves out. It's his job to lead. To lead them into something, or out of it. He'll figure that part out on the fly. He hopes. More than hopes. _Needs_ to.

The bunker is big and empty and silent. "Connix?" Poe calls, and feels a pang of regretful relief when there's no answer. He slips into the head, locks the door, splashes pungent water from the tap onto his face. There's no mirror but he says to his dim reflection in the stainless steel sink, "Get a hold of yourself." Then he leans back against the wall for a moment to just breathe. To just be.

Luke Skywalker, limned in ghostly blue, is sitting atop the closed toilet with his hands folded atop his crossed legs. "By all means," he says. "Get a hold of yourself, and don't let me stop you."


	8. Chapter 8

There are legends, of course, about the great Jedi of the past leaving an imprint of themselves on the Force when they pass. Of their lingering in the cracks and quiet moments of this world before they pass out of it for good. To offer guidance to those left behind, or just to watch the seeds they'd planted grow and thrive before turning their backs forever on the garden of their lives.

Of course, none of those legends as far as Poe had ever heard involved a ghost-infested toilet, and yet, here he was. "All right," he says, trying to convince himself that it is. His mother knew this man but until Crait, Poe had only ever seen him at a distance, or on the holo, from the part he played in the early days of the New Republic. That Republic is ashes on the wind, now. As is, he supposes, Skywalker himself. Poe leans against the sink and folds his arms. "You haunting a lot of bathrooms these days, Master Skywalker?"

"I'm too dead to stand on ceremony. Call me Luke." The shadow of a smile crosses Luke's face. He looks older here than he did on Crait, deeper lines carved in his cheeks, his hair more ragged and cut through with gray. Death must really take a lot out of a guy. "And as it happens, the bathroom is a convenient place to catch my nephew alone for a heart-to-heart."

"How's that working out for you?"

"As well as you might expect." The shadow on Luke's face shifts, congeals into something harder. "But I'm not here about him. My sister … "

Something electric prickles along Poe's spine. He straightens, and his eyes rake the deep shadows in the corners. "Is she here too?"

"Oh. No." Luke's face falls. "It's true, then. She's gone. My experience of the Force is so much different now, but I hoped--"

"Hope'll burn you." That pops out of Poe before he can help it. He waves a hand at Luke's eerily blue outline. "So you're saying she's not going to do … whatever this is?"

"I don't sense her pattern in the Force's weave. I told her what I knew, about becoming _whatever this is_." A self-deprecating flick of his hand recapitulates Poe's gesture. "Before everything--before. But if she was ready to move on."

A moment of anger squeezes the pulse in Poe's temples. Then it's gone as fast as it came, leaving the dull ache of resignation behind. "Because the Resistance is over. There was nothing left for her here. We took everything she built up all her life and we knocked it all down like it was nothing."

"Oh?" Luke draws himself up to his full height--which, still seated on the toilet as he is, is not all that much. "Is that what you think happened?"

"There's less than thirty of us left. Against the entire remainder of the First Order fleet. And we don't have--" _An actual leader_. "And now we don't have her with us."

"No. You don't." Luke leans forward over his crossed knee. "Did my sister ever, in her life, leave something unfinished or halfway-done?"

Poe's hand shifts, briefly, to the lingering bruise on his chest where he took the brunt of a stun bolt. "… No."

"Mm." Luke relaxes back, slouching against the toilet tank. His face releases some of its tension, going slack as he stares past Poe, through him. "She was always the stronger of us, in ways I never knew how to be. More Organa than Skywalker, and the galaxy was better for it." His gaze sharpens. "And she left the future to you. So what are you going to do with it?"

Not what she would do. That's a door closed to him now. "I don't know." But even as he says it he thinks that perhaps he does, or has an inkling of it. Not the answer itself, but the faint shape of it in the darkness that he might still grope his way toward. " … Yet."

Luke's mouth crooks, not a smile and not _not_ a smile either. His outline shifts and flickers but Poe calls after him: "Wait!"

Luke's apparition resolves into something like being again. Poe says, "Not that it isn't good to talk to someone else who knew her. But it isn't me you should be haunting, you know."

A shrug, one shoulder twitching up and down. "There's nothing I could tell her that she doesn't already know better than I do. She has … the same kind of longing carved on her heart as I did, once. I think she'll fill those wounds more wisely than I ever did. She's already seen what happens when a person climbs up on a pedestal and finds it breaking beneath them. And she's smarter than that."

Poe's fingers find that still-sore spot under his breastbone again. It's not just the old sting of the stun bolt that hurts. "Sounds to me like someone ought to tell _her_ that."

"Why, yes." Sarcasm makes Luke sound painfully like his sister. "I imagine someone should." And like that he's gone, abruptly eclipsed by the darkness. Poe grimaces at the toilet, which is just a toilet again and not a dead Jedi's broken pedestal.

He splashes his face with water again--which seems the bare minimum reaction to seeing a ghost before breakfast--and combs wet fingers through his hair until they stop shaking.

When he's able, he trots back out across the base grounds toward the Falcon. He moves fast and keeps his eyes forward and his chin to his chest; no one gets in his way or vies for a shred of his attention. He catches Chewbacca stowing gear in the Falcon's crew quarters, and he blurts out the system name that's been burning on his tongue all day. "Yavin. When we're all squared away, put us on a bearing for Yavin. All right?"

#

With her fuel tanks finally full, the Falcon darts out of Rori's atmosphere with a pair of A-wings chasing merrily in her wake. It's not much, Rey thinks, but it's more than they came here with. That must count for something. She will _make_ it count, down to each and every last bolt and panel.

Poe and Chewbacca are at the helm to manage the jump to lightspeed; Finn and a former pilot hold positions in the gunners' turrets on the off chance that they meet with unwanted company on the trip out-of-system. Rose half-dozes in one of the Falcon's bunks; meanwhile, around the corner in the crew space, Connix and a few others have packed the seats around the battered hologame table. They talk with low-pitched voices, to let Rose sleep. Rey steals closer to the group, not wanting to make her presence too obvious, to draw all eyes to herself and center their chatter on her.

"I just don't understand it," the Abenedo pilot is saying in a clipped-accent Basic. "He's lost his edge. It's like we left the real man behind on Crait and brought along a snip-mouse wearing his skin."

Connix's face is pale, with ash still smeared behind her ears and at her temples where her washing-up didn't quite reach. "You know he's from Yavin? If the Resistance only exists as a farewell tour for where we're all from--"

"Master Rey," says one of the pilots, and the indrawn breath from the circle around the table could have sucked a Hutt down a missile tube.

Rey feels blood rush to her face, in spite of her best efforts at calm. The soothing thrum of the engines through the decking under her boots reassures her, grounds her despite the total lack of ground for a hundred thousand miles in any direction just now. "You don't need to call me that," she says, and adds for good measure, "in fact, please don't. A few days' training--that hardly makes me a Jedi."

A sudden burst of instinct carries her forward, toward the table; Connix slides over and makes a sliver of room on the seat beside her. Rey perches upon it, terribly cognizant that the only thing saving her from being at the crux of all this attention is that everyone's gazes slide nervously around, landing everywhere but on her. She says, testingly, "I understand why you're worried. Upset, even. I know it looks dire."

"More than _looks_ ," grunts C'ai, and another pilot drive an elbow into his side to silence him.

"The captain might not be forthcoming with his plan. And it's frustrating, surely, to have come this far. To not know how much farther." With her words, she has drawn their gazes. Hesitant, dubious, cautiously interested. And unwanted, oh yes, but so long as she has them, she might as well do something worthwhile with them. "I don't mean to suggest that I'm in his confidence either. But I can--I can see the shape of things. The road we're taking our first steps out onto." And, as she says it, she realizes she can: not a solid goal, nothing so certain as the glimpse of the future she once shared with Ben Solo and had stolen by him in turn. But a map, roughly scrawled against the face of the galaxy. A certain inevitable rhythm, though the notes of the melody are yet to be heard.

"Are you saying we're going to win?" Doubt and hope war in Connix's voice.

Rey is the one who instigated that battle, and guilt cuts her deep. There's a fine line between hope and false hope, between offering light and burning away possibility with the cruel unfiltered flame of logic. "I'm saying," she says, "that I am looking forward to whatever comes next."

A ripple of silence, and of eyes that once again don't know where to look. The pilot whose name Rey doesn't know mutters something about a game of dejarik to pass the time, and C'ai gropes around the side of the hologame table till half a dozen figures flicker to life atop the black and white surface. As they pick sides, a shadow flickers partway up the walkway that leads to the Falcon's hidden compartments--and beyond that, the cockpit. It's Poe, already turning away, and she can't help but wonder how much heard and what he'll make of it.

Then Finn is there, relieved of gun duty by the jump into hyperspace, and she doesn't want to crack the beautiful fragile bridge they've started building between one another, between themselves and Rose as well, so she takes a moment to enjoy the strange easy warmth of his hand on her shoulder, of his presence behind her and close to her, instead of following after Poe straight away. Finn would understand, she thinks, but she doesn't want him to have to simply _understand_.

When enough time has passed she excuses herself for a moment, and traces a likely path through the Falcon. Not in the cockpit, not in the cargo bay, not by the engineering station. She finds him finally in the second bunkroom--not the one where Rose tosses and turns in search of pain-free sleep, but the other, empty but for Poe. He's asleep, hands are tucked into his armpits and knees pulled up toward his chest. Resistance pilots are the best, she's been told, at snatching fragments of sleep here and there when they can, for they never know when those brief rests may be shattered by an incoming attack.

She reaches out to smooth the furrow in his brow. The restless churn of dream-ravaged sleep reaches her before she reaches him; she thinks better of it and pulls her hand back before she actually touches him. It would be terribly easy to peer into his head, to pick neatly through thought and memory and leave no fingerprints behind. Whether he's angry or disappointed that she should slide without apparent effort into a position of confidence with the crew; whether he distrusts the motives of the earnest belief she's thrown his way--that's none of her business unless he makes it so. Her desire to do otherwise whispers in her ear and its voice belongs to the dark side. If he wants to lead from a distance, without the drain and draw of complicated relationships with the people that Force and fate have set him in charge of, that's his choice.

There's an old ratty blanket kicked under one of the bunks. When she picks it up, it smells faintly of Wookiee; she throws it over Poe anyway and leaves him to what rest may yet come.


	9. Chapter 9

The shudder of the ship when it drops out of hyperspace wakes Poe up. He takes a moment to scrub sleep from his eyes and rue the sour tang of his own morning breath. When he stands and stretches the crick in his neck, he can see that are other occupants in the other two bunks; he ducks out into the hall as they stir, before they can ask him questions for which he hasn't yet pieced together the answers.

And then he's in the cockpit, behind Chewbacca who's busy adjusting their course for planetfall, and Yavin 4 hangs big and close in the starry sky. The two A-wings dance just ahead, on either side, as the Falcon angles in along the planet's terminator line: pitch-black night on one side; on the other, emerald shot through with complex bands of azure and aquamarine. Home.

He wishes he knew _exactly_ what the hell he was doing here, at least half as well as Rey seems to know. Maybe she ought to be the one out in front of all this, broken pedestals or no … no. She has enough on her back as it is. Well, maybe she'll just tip him as to what his plan is, if he asks her nicely--but of course he can't do that, either. Everyone's faith is balanced on the tip of a blaster barrel right now, and he doesn't dare give it a push. There's something there, a formless void of an idea, lingering on the tip of his tongue like a word he can't quite remember.

Chewbacca yowls a question--should he put the Falcon down on top of the old Rebel base? "More or less." Poe leans over his shoulder for a minimal adjustment to the flight plan: not the old hangar bay beside the ancient hulking temples, where the Falcon would have rested once upon a time so many years ago. The last time he saw it, the hangar bay was being used as a barn for the neighbors' woolbeetles. But there is a cement landing pad just a kilometer or so out from the base, on the property of what's now an overgrown ranch. The pad is covered over with blown-about branches and a spiderwebbed layer of unchecked vine growth, but the gust of wind from under the Falcon sweeps the old underbrush away.

As soon as he feels the Falcon's landing gears kiss the ground, he's out of the cockpit and taking long strides through the ship's corridors, past the rest of the crew, who is straggling their way to the head, the galley, the storage lockers. He's at the top of the entry ramp before it pops, and he doesn't even wait for it to be all the way open before ducking through the narrow gap and dropping to the ground outside.

The air pulls beads of sweat from his skin right away; he sheds his jacket and hangs it over his shoulder. It's hot and humid, but the right kind of humid: not mildewed and sour, but rich with the sweet earthiness of jungle soil and recent rain. He takes a deep breath and holds it in his lungs as if he could absorb whatever it is he's missing straight out of the air.

Footsteps on the ramp make him spin guiltily. But it's just Finn, his face scrunched against the bright-blazing sun and heat. "This is where you're from?" he asks, looking around, as he pulls up beside Poe. A pair of blue and white birds take flight, objecting raucously to the arrival of the freighter and its two A-wing consorts in their quiet habitat. "I bet wherever I'm from isn't half as pretty as this place."

"If you're in the market for a homeworld you could do worse." Poe clamps his jaw against whatever uncomfortably open-hearted words were behind those, and turns them into a laugh instead.

But Finn nods seriously. "You already gave me a name. I feel a little bad taking a homeworld off you too." Finn looks around, taking in the old ranch, with its boarded-up windows, the hole in the roof. If he notices the unguarded look Poe shoots him, he doesn't react. "You still got family here?"

"Nah." Time has dulled the sharpness of that ache, but the recent loss of Leia opens the wound afresh. "My mom died when I was just a kid, my dad not long after I left for the Republic Navy. They're buried down the hill, over that way. The only things living here now are the stonebats and the--"

Finn waits patiently for a long moment, then cocks his head. "The what?"

But Poe's already seized by a thought, by something long dormant and now waking in him, a memory of someone else's memory. He spins on one heel to head back up into the ship but Rey is already standing in the middle of the ramp, staff slung over one shoulder, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the humidity-hazed sunlight. Of course. Of course. Why is he here, unless it's to give her this? The Force is not fair and it is not kind, but there is a certain inexorable rhythm to its patterns. Here is the way forward. Here is a reason, if not the reason, why so many things have come together in the way they have. He steps up the ramp, grabs Rey's hand. "Come on," he says, and pulls her into a dead run beside him. "I need to show you something."

#

The tree is … bigger than Poe remembers.

"Your parents planted this?" Rey asks. She steps lightly between the huge, twisted roots where they have writhed up out of the soil. Here and there she stops to test the loose earth with a prod of her staff. "I can feel the Force so strongly here."

"It was a gift from Luke Skywalker. My mother helped him save the last fragments of the Jedi's Great Tree, the one that used to live in the temple of Coruscant." He cranes his head back to search the tree's swaying canopy for his old handholds, the little fort he once built at the crook of its split trunk. Time has swept all that away--time, and the thing's swollen size. How long has it been since he stood at the foot of the tree and looked up? He doesn't remember paying a visit when he came to bury his father. Something licks at the corner of his consciousness, and he hesitates. "Speaking of Skywalker. You haven't … seen … anything of him?"

Rey hesitates, staff frozen halfway to the ground. "He's gone. Very much gone, though I wish it weren't so. If I could convince myself he was still out there, that we still held whatever possibility was there, when we thought he might come back to us--"

"No. No. I know." He picks up a broken twig. When he straightens, he sees Rose and Finn approaching across the ranch's overgrown lawn. At least it's only them, so far. He's not surprised in the least that they've followed her. The three are a system, now, no one part moving without the other two shifting to compensate. "And we have all the possibility we need as long as you're with us."

The surprised smile that lights her face is like a sunrise. He feels almost bad, then, for a moment before he'd been ready to push her towards what desperately-needed answers lie in the Force. Then he feels worse, for being so ready to let a soft smile--a soft smile that he had no claim to!--turn his head away from what needed to be done. His parents hadn't settled here and made a proper life together until after Endor. They'd done what needed to be done first. And they hadn't gone seeking that life in the eyes of someone whose soft gazes had already settled on other--more welcoming--faces. His eyes flick to Finn and Rose, who have stopped just before crossing under the Force tree's vast shadow. Poe's got no business seeking at all, not until he has something to give beyond a life and likely death facing down the First Order. He swallows around the suddenly dry spot in his throat, and says uncertainly, "So …"

Rey's staff sticks in the ground. "Yes, I can feel it too." She works the staff back and forth, shoulder muscles straining. "Do you know, Leia told me she once thought you might be Force-sensitive? Because of how good a pilot you are, all the things you've lived through that by all odds you wouldn't have." She sweeps a hand, taking in the tree's huge overhanging branches. "She didn't mention you'd grown up around a tree like this."

"I'm a good pilot because I started flying at the same time I learned how to read." Anger inflates swiftly inside him, crushing everything else flat. Then just as quickly, it collapses and leaves a sickly hollow feeling in its wake. "She told you that?" The words tumble out in a monotone, but what he means to ask is: _she told_ you _that?_

A guilty flush of pink touches Rey's cheeks. "I think she thought that once. Not anymore--I mean--" They both look away. "I think she was trying to make me feel that, even if there are no more Jedi, the Force might be in anyone. Places I have yet to look. That I'm not alone in this."

You'll never be alone in this, Poe opens his mouth to say, but she sighs as the staff loosens in her grasp. "There," she says. "I suppose you don't feel that?" She takes a small step toward the tree and slides into a hole in the ground beneath one reaching root. Gone, just like that.

"Rey? Rey!" This is the fire on Rori all over again, except this time he can't see her. Without the reassurance of his eyes, his brain tells him he's gone and lost another Resistance hero. Ashes thrown on the fire, and all on his watch. This time he doesn't hesitate before following her, boots first into the darkness.

#

Rey thrills to see what the Force wants to show her here. It _will_ show her something. Perhaps in the backwards, cruel way that the cave under the island did, though she thinks not. There is a certain understanding, a warmth, to the call of the tree in contrast to what she heard on Ahch-To: or maybe that it is only that she has learned to hear differently now. Either way she is prepared. Unkindness can be a teacher too, albeit one she would inflict only on herself.

Beneath the tree it should be dark, and it is, but for channels of light that run and sear along the edges of her vision. She has a strange sensation in her body, her limbs--a certain flattening, in contrast to the cave that stretched and pulled her infinitely along a twisted axis of time and space. She distances herself from her _self_ , and looks again. Ah, yes: she can see it now: a broken maze of mirrors, each razor-edged facet and plane cradled in another outstretched tendril of root. The lights that burn in the periphery of her sight are lines of Force energy, concentrated in these roots to draw boundaries between the mirror's shattered fragments. Rey herself is painted over the surface of a mirror at one end of the maze; when she reaches out across the seam of light that divides her facet from the next, her fingers blaze and burn where she touches the boundary.

Well. That won't do. She takes a deep breath and steps through entirely. There is a certain fizzle of electricity, but it doesn't hurt or burn. She considers herself from the new perspective appointed to her by the mirror's obtuse angle. Of course. She is who she is, and dividing herself, cutting herself off, the head from the heart or the hand from the body it serves, is no way to go about something as essential as being.

The mirrors shift, a change in state both subtle and yet as apparent to Rey as a droplet of water vaporized to mist on a hot engine. She looks around, sees only a web of empty mirrors, and steps across to a third plane in case it changes her view enough.

Oh: she isn't alone here anymore. Poe has followed her into the tree--can he feel its call through the Force after all? No, she doesn't think so. Though she can see his reflection clearly thanks to the seams of Force-light that fracture the gleaming crystal surfaces, he stares sightlessly through her. "Rey?" he shouts, though she is so close she could have touched him, if she were not circumscribed so entirely within her mirror.

But he is not so constrained. Before she can call back to him, find the path through which she can cross from this plane to his, he's already coming apart. He shows no sign of the sting that Rey felt when she broke the electric barriers between the mirrors, but break them he does. A hand grasps blindly and breaks away, flitting from surface to surface. One eye shatters away from the other and splinters into a dozen reflections of itself, all different sizes. His chest cracks down the middle: one shoulder slouches sideways into an perpendicular plane, the other calves off into a tiny plane trapped in the cleft of a root.

Smaller shards spin away: a button, a patch of early gray hair. If this keeps up there will be nothing left. Rey's belly twists nauseously. No time to doubt or second-guess. She shifts herself to the nearest mirror, gently collects the stray reflection of an ear first. "Listen," she says, half question and half demand, and carries it with her onward, forward. An eye next--just one for now. The other darts wildly from its fragment far up near the apex of the root structure. "Look," she pleads, and then the mirrors shift twice more in quick succession.

Finn is--Finn. He's whole and remains that way on a single mirrored plane. It's just that his reflection is upside down, an absolute inverse to the others. "Poe?" he yells. "Rey?" His eyes find hers. "What is this? What's going on?"

"It's the Force." She checks Rose over too as she chases a hand across mirror after mirror. When at last she catches it, she grasps it tightly, and it answers in kind.

"Oh no," Rose gasps. She catches Poe's boot as it fractures into her reach. At first look Rey had thought Rose was coming apart in the same way Poe has done, but that's not so. Her two halves stand on either side of a jagged crack between two mirrors: whichever way she moves, her reflection leaps to a new seam so that there is forever a thread of torn Force-light binding the two sides together. Her eyebrows pinch worriedly together around that uneven line. "What do we do?"

"Help me," says Rey, and those words snap something in her, something cold and hard and false that says that begging for help is beneath a Jedi--beneath whatever she actually is. She squeezes in beside Rose, begins to help her reassemble Poe. Finn joins them: three sculptors carving a man out of nothing. Their hands smooth away seams, join pieces to the whole. He's trembling beneath the complex coordination of their work. Rey thinks she might be, too. When he's there, when he's real again, she takes the same hand that she caught before and clasps it in both of hers. "You should have said something." A pause, a tight spot in her throat. "I wouldn't have said anything," she admits.

This time when he looks around his eyes find her face. His head falls forward, rests against her chest just under her chin. Finn is there too, then, kneeling down upside down in the space just above. Rose's hand, the one on this side of the seam, finds its way to Poe's hair. "It's okay," he says, and his voice is rough. "It think I know … I think I know something I didn't know when I came in here. Maybe more than one something, even. Although …" He leans into her a little farther, reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose. "We didn't just break the Force, did we?"

"What?" A laugh bubbles up out of Rey from somewhere unexpected. "No! No, I promise, the Force isn't broken."

"Sometimes," Rose says quietly, "things just don’t match up the way you expect."

Rey levers herself to her feet, and pulls Poe with her before reaching down to help up Rose. Then she reaches up, and her hand breaks through the dirt to spill golden sunlight down over her face.


	10. Chapter 10

They can't have been in the Force cave for more than three or four minutes, tops. But breaking back into the Yavin sunshine, into the hot heavy air, chases a lingering chill out of Poe's hands and feet. Finn gives him the last boost he needs to clamber free, and then he turns back to pull Finn clear too.

Finn doesn't let go of Poe once he's standing on solid ground. His hand locks around Poe's elbow. "Are you okay?" he demands.

Poe pauses to shake clotted dirt free from his clothes. How the hell can he be covered in dirt--wasn't he just covered in _mirror_? The ways of the Force are mysterious, occasionally verging into the downright ridiculous. "I'm all right."

"Why are we here, Poe?" Rey's question is soft. Not a challenge, but an outstretched hand, offering him a way across this chasm he's dug around himself.

He stares out into the hazy steam of the jungle for a moment before answering. "At first," he says, and finally tugs free of Finn's grasp to scrub both hands through his hair. "At first it was just that we needed to be somewhere and this was the _somewhere_ I wanted to see the most. In case it was over. In case all this had become just a suicide mission--"

"Hey, no," Finn cuts in. "No one else is dying just for the sake of dying. The First Order is big, but they're not all-powerful."

"You have a plan, Poe." Rose doesn't ask, just states it plainly, solidly. Makes it real. "What is it?"

Her eyes brim with hope and something uncomfortably like faith. Poe shakes his head. "What if it's the wrong plan?"

Rey looks around and lifts a hand, taking in the sun-dappled ground beneath the Force tree, the overgrown ranch, the soft fragrance of the jungle and the far-off cries of the birds. "Any plan that starts with falling back on the strength of what you care about most," she says, "isn't a bad plan."

#

They find the others milling around: peering into the fogged-over windows of the ranch, experimenting with the overripe tropical fruits hanging from the overburdened bushes in the yard. Talking in small clots: planning the next mutiny, perhaps. Poe can hardly blame them if they are: he's the one who first drew that knife, after all, and now that it's tasted blood it won't go so easily back into its scabbard.

Chewbacca lingers by the bottom of the ramp, alone but for one small bit of company. BB-8 stays just inside the ship, avoiding the short circuit he'd probably earn himself by taking a dunk in a soft spot on the rainwater-soaked ground. Upon seeing Poe, he issues a series of loud raspberries. "I know," Poe tells him, and steps up onto the ramp to bring himself to eye level with the little droid. "You're right. I have been avoiding you."

BB-8 gives a brief, wounded chirp. "No, buddy. Nothing you did. I was trying to get my head right. Just not doing a very good job of it. I'm sorry."

Rocking gently on his axis, BB-8 brings his top dome forward just far enough for Poe to reach up and pat him on what passes for a head. He trills lightly, and Poe smiles. "Thanks, pal. You too."

Then he turns to Chewbacca. "Got to round up the crew for a little heart to heart. It would mean a lot to have you with us, but I can't ask you to--"

Chewbacca bellows a reply that ends in a dismissive snort. He strolls off toward the ranch house, collecting the tight little knots of people in his wake as he passes. Finn and Rey and Rose are already gathering up the others who have straggled as far as the fruit bushes and the thick green fringe where the jungle hungrily encroaches on the cleared cement pad and the open yard. Okay. So it's happening.

He hustles over to the group, struggling to keep a pace somewhere in the happy medium between _so slow everyone's going to think he's weighed down by a galaxy and a half of dread_ and _too fast for him to actually piece together what the hell he's going to say_. And then he's there, with a few dozen dubious stares pinned to him from those standing all around. At the rear are Finn and Rey, leaning into each other; Finn nods at him and he manages to return the gesture. Then there's Rose, shouldering through to the front of the assembled group. Her jaw is set, her gaze expectant. She really, honestly believes he's got this. So he's going to have to.

"So," he says, when silent apprehension stretches just a moment too long. Sarcasm, oil-slick and oh so easy to reach for, coats his tongue; he swallows it and reaches for something like sincerity. "The job ahead of us is a big one. Too big for us to handle alone. Even if we are the best of the best." Front and center, Rose's mouth quirks in a proud smile. "And we are."

"We already asked for help," interrupts C'ai. A few others mutter similar sentiments, although they're not willing to commit to broadcasting them at the same volume and intensity as the Abednedo. "Look what that got us."

Poe holds up a finger. "Yeah, we did. We asked for help. But that's all we did. _Asked_. We weren't offering anything in return."

Connix shifts. Her arms, which had been folded across her chest, come down by her sides. "And what is it that we have to offer?"

"A chance." Poe's eyes flick to Rey and Finn, then back to Connix, who bites the inside of her cheek. She's listening. That's all he can ask for at this point. "Just a chance. A flicker of hope. The Force is with us, because it's with her. Someone smart and strong and just--just too damn good to put herself up on any sort of broken pedestal." He nods at Rey, whose cheeks flush pink as more people turn to gawk at her. She leans into Finn, whose arm comes up around her back, and somehow, instead of a jealous sting, that sight just gives Poe what he needs to go full throttle. He pulls everyone's attention back to him, away from their would-be Jedi. "Sure, it's just a chance, what we're offering. But it's more than they've got right now."

"Coruscant will be flying the red and black in a week, if they aren't already." One of the other pilots jerks her shoulders, as if she hasn't got enough energy to manage a full shrug. "What's your entry point to the big players, then? Getting Corellia in line will be worse than herding nerfs. The Trade Fleets won't be much better."

"Not interested in the big players." Poe leans forward into the stormwinds of muttering and murmurs that this statement wakes. "The First Order's already fighting for control of one of those systems and they'll have eyes on the other likely contenders. We need to steer clear of anything Core-ward."

C'ai hisses. "I don't plan to live the rest of my life leaping from system to system, one step ahead of the First Order or whatever local slime-heads fly their flag."

"Well, I don't either. Ruling out big systems doesn't mean writing ourselves out entirely." He reaches to the side, knocks away the vines that have overgrown a three-foot lever embedded in the ground. When he puts his weight into turning the lever, the rollaway door on the low-slung building behind him grinds open. Inside, there sleeps a thirty-year-old A-wing interceptor, in prime shape but for a dense layer or dust. His mother's. He looks at it once over his shoulder before pressing onward: it's now or never. "All right. Our fleet size just grew by one." He exhales, chooses at random. "Connix. New Alderaan's got a home fleet, haven't they?"

Her eyes widen, then narrow: surprise chased away by doubt and suspicion. "You can barely call it a fleet. It's just two light cruisers and half a wing of snubfighters. The bare minimum to keep pirates out of the system."

"Sounds like a fleet to me," says Rose, and Poe is obscurely glad to have a least a fraction of the muttering going on in his support.

Connix shakes her head. "You're forgetting that General Organa already asked them for help. And they didn’t come."

"Would they come if _you_ asked them for help?" Poe asks, and that strikes her silent.

"We're not taking on the First Order with two light cruisers," objects C'ai. Others nod in angry assent. "That's madness."

Poe rounds on C'ai next. "What's Abednedo got in the skies? Out in the Colonies, but you must have salvaged something from the Imperial occupation."

C'ai's mouth works silently for a moment. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, says slowly, "Nothing like a Star Destroyer if that's what you were hoping for." His mouth tendrils wobble. "Half a dozen battlecruisers, give or take what's in the spacedocks for repairs any given day. Not much in the way of fighters. A couple of transports."

"Kashyyyk has something similar, I think." Poe nods along as Chewbacca rumbles a few more details about the Wookiees' home fleet. He points to others in turn, the pilots and aides and junior officers, the fragmented shards of what was the Resistance. He wants to see what those pieces make, when he puts them all together and steps back to see the grander design. "Christophsis. Takodana. Akiva. Mon Cala. The places we come from, that we still have ties to. The people who will _listen_ when we say, not just that we need them--because we do--but that all this isn't in vain."

Silence holds its breath for a long, terrible moment. Then C'ai says, first and grudgingly, "Okay."

Acceptance ripples outward from him: firm nods, bowed heads. Rose's eyes shine too brightly; Chewbacca throws back his head and howls a mournful note that prickles the back of Poe's neck. "Okay," he echoes. "Okay." And it will be. He will, they will, make it so.

#

C'ai takes the helm of Poe's family A-wing to join Orid and the other pilot from Rori in the tiny snubfighter formation that once again tags behind the Millennium Falcon. Meanwhile, Rey and Chewbacca set a hyperspace course that will take them, first of all, to Kashyyyk. In between course calculations and adjustments, Chewbacca rumbles that he hopes that, perhaps, his son Waroo will join the Wookiee fleet. Rey had not known that Chewbacca had a son, a family, at all. "I hope so too," she says, "I'd like to meet him, if he's anything at all like his father." Chewbacca grunts, proud and pleased.

She stays in the cockpit to keep him company after the jump to lightspeed, but uneven footsteps on the grating behind the seats make her turn to see who's there. It's Rose, pausing to lean against the back of Rey's chair to take the weight off her bad leg. "Hi," she says, more to Chewbacca than to Rey. "All right if I borrow your copilot?"

Chewbacca yowls something that makes Rey flush scarlet up to tips of her ears. She pushes herself upright and takes Rose by the wrist as Rose asks, "Was that a yes--?"

Rose ushers her to the first bunk room, where BB-8 lurks just outside the door. He whistles sternly at them as they pull up; Rey drops down to one knee beside him. "I'm entirely grown," she reminds him, "and I think I can decide for myself when I need rest."

That earns her only a rude blatt in response. She gives him a little rap of her knuckles and moves past him to push the door open. The three bunks inside are bare: someone has pulled down all the mattresses and laid them out side-by-side upon the floor. Threadbare pillows and a pair of blankets so covered in Wookiee fur they might as well be made of the stuff are strewn on top. "I don't need to be _minded_ ," she says, but she has to stifle a yawn to get the words out.

Muffled words in the corridor, that Rey can't quite make out. Heavy feet, weary ones, slow and stop; she can't see the people standing out there but she recognizes them by the shape of the shadows that fall through the doorway, and by the imprint they leave on the Force, too, of course. "You gave me your jacket, though. I thought--"

"You had your own thing going on, you didn't need me getting in the middle of it, and by the way, I want to be absolutely sure you know that this is the most juvenile argument I've ever had. And I have had no shortage of juvenile arguments."

"You can't get in the middle of something that you're already supposed to be part of."

"Look, the first thing you said to me after you woke up was, 'Where's Rey?', so _I_ thought--"

The two shadows bend together and lightly touch. Warmth coasts up and down Rey's arms, born of secondhand happiness and more than a little of her very own embarrassment. Rose waits a moment, then calls out, "Door's open, you know."

A muffled curse, then Poe steps into the frame of the doorway. "Okay," he says, "so it's 'ambush the old guy', is it?"

Finn gives him a light shove from behind and sends him tripping into the room. "It's actually 'lay down before you fall down', which is what you're going to do."

"I bet the First Order doesn't put up with this kind of insubordination." Poe steadies himself with a handhold on one empty bunk and glares around at the other three. From the hallway, BB-8 remonstrates him colorfully, and bumps the door shut.

"Nope," agrees Finn. "And that's why they're going to lose."

The certainty in Finn's voice buoys Rey's heart up, makes it beat just that much faster. Faster than it already is. But Poe's forehead creases at that. She reaches out to touch his arm as Finn asks, as he had earlier that day, "Are you all right?"

"Oh, of course he's not all right," says Rose. "He just lost the last of his family and you think he's going to just be okay? Stop asking that." She turns to Poe, arms folded across her chest, and leans in. "She loved you, you know. I bet she never said so, because chains of command and also because look what happened the last time she managed to love someone. She should have." She hesitates; bites her lip. "So should you, probably. I get why you both couldn't, or at least why you wouldn't. But you don’t have to be _fine_ about it, all the time, like it was nothing."

"And you can't just cut yourself off from--yourself," says Rey, who doesn't mean to pile on. But she can't help herself from chasing away what darkness lingers over this place, over these people. "Did you think we'd think more of you for keeping a distance that you didn't really want?"

To her surprise this pulls a laugh out of Poe. "You know what it feels like being scolded by someone ten years younger than you?" His smile recedes a fraction. "You sound like Leia."

"And you can't just cut yourself off from--yourself," says Rey, who doesn't mean to pile on. But she can't help herself from chasing away what darkness lingers over this place, over these people. "Did you think we'd think more of you for keeping a distance that you didn't really want?"

To her surprise this pulls a laugh out of Poe. "You know what it feels like being scolded by someone ten years younger than you?" His smile recedes a fraction. "You sound like Leia."

That brightens Rey's mood and sours it at the same time. Finn shakes his head at her knowingly. "I'm not sure that was exactly what she was aiming for," he says. "Though it makes me feel a little better that you don't listen to her any more than you listen to me."

Rey hears Poe's teeth clack together, and feels the confusion, the certain lonely desire, trapped behind them. "Look," he says, "you've already got your--your arrangement. I can be your friend without throwing a mine into whatever sort of gravity field you're already navigating. I don't need to be a part of it."

"You're saying _need_ when what you should be saying is _want_. What you want, what we do too. The Jedi were celibate, from what I've read." Rey shakes her head. "How well did that work out for them?"

"Giving in to whatever you want? That sounds like the Dark Side talking, to me."

"I didn't say _whatever_ you want. Not whatever I want, either. Or what he does, or she does." She nods at Finn and Rose in turn. "But caring about other people is not the Dark Side. Coveting and collecting them, certainly." Her hands clench briefly into fists, then relax, smoothing down the sides of her trousers. "Treating them as objects, means to an end, even if that object is your affection--that's not what we're talking about here. There is wanton greed and lust and self-indulgence and there is self-denial for no other purpose than itself, and somewhere in the middle is a fine balance. I would like to walk that line, with you, all of you." Her throat spasms suddenly, around an emotion of unknown provenance and bottomless depths. "I don't know if I can all by myself."

"You know what?" Rose, summoning an unimaginable intensity of cheerfulness, shatters the crystalline moment. "I'm tired. We don't have to negotiate this down to the nuts and bolts right this second. We don't need bylaws for this. Can't we just--you know-- _be_?"

Finn checks the chrono on his wrist. "We've got seven hours till we make Kashyyyk. Long enough to get some shut-eye."

"I could sleep," says Rey, which verges on lying. An electric feeling of possibility prickles her skin. A confidence that even if she cannot see the path ahead, she can feel her way forward, and there will be sure, steady hands to hold along the way. She tosses her boots and her belt into the corner before she can think better of it. Then she lowers herself to the thin mattress with her head at one end of the room and her feet disappearing under the lowest bunk.

Silence descends. After a moment the others follow suit, with a rustle of jackets and weary limbs. They settle into four parallel lines: all oriented in the same direction, but never meeting or intersecting. An elegant mathematical system, but a cold one.

Rey rolls over, shifting onto her side. Poe is there, already looking at her. A fragile hope gleams like stars in his eyes. She would like to visit those constellations with him, one by one. "You're going to be amazing," he says. "I thought you needed to know. Or, wait, I mean--" He amends, hastily. "I hope you already know. I thought someone needed to _tell_ you, too."

She doesn't know what to say to that, so she says, simply, "Thank you." Her hand finds his chest where it rises and falls in the open collar of his shirt. "And I hope you know that whatever happens, wherever we go from here--you'll have people who believe in you, and in the Resistance, at your back."

"I don't--" Again he cuts himself off. "I'm kind of a slow learner. But I think I could figure that out, with a little time." A self-deprecating smile. "And patience."

Bodies shift and realign. By the time Rey's eyes close--and stay that way--her head rests on the solid plane of Poe's shoulder, her arm drapes across him so that her arm can rest on the warm familiar line of Finn's side. Finn's left arm is Poe's pillow and his right hand holds Rose's when she burrows up against the curved line of Rey's back and curls the crook of her elbow around Rey's waist. Her breath is warm against the side of Rey's neck. Sleep drifts in slowly, piling up cozily around the four of them. Not as much rest as they should have had, not the full and proper time they each need right now to recuperate and recover against the still-tender wounds that cross their hearts. But there is a moment's peace at the eye of the storm, and they will stretch it out for as long as they can together.

The ways of the Force are not kind and they are not fair. But sometimes, they are _enough_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe it's done--thank you for reading! Your confidence in the destination I've been driving at all this time means a lot to me. <3

**Author's Note:**

> Like Rey, all my childhood heroes are dead now. This story is, in part, my way of processing that.
> 
> It's also a bit of writing therapy for me. I've been blocked for a few months now and I just wanted to write something gentle and kind and sweet. I just want these four to be happy.


End file.
